Seven Hours for a Lifetime
by poetic licence
Summary: Your whole life can flash before your eyes in minutes or hours. For Olivia. Dracocentric Minor Slash: Draco & Harry


**Disclaimer:** The Harry Potter books and other trademarks are © by JK Rowling, Little Literacy Agency, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, Arthur A. Levine, & Warner Brothers. No profit is being made, it's all good clean fun. _Really_.

_**Seven Hours For A Lifetime**_

- for olivia lupin, a birthday present seven weeks in the making -

- **midnight** -

A city sleeps restlessly, dark shadows cast from a wandering moon. Dogs bark in the stillness, cars glide the streets withtheir headlights dim against the fog.

Not everyone sleeps though.

A silvery face, six stories up, is pressed against the glass. Breathing hard, like having just run a marathon, but more with cold and fright than anything else. He knows they're coming, those creatures of the night, to break down his door, to riddle him with an illness that he has carried within him since he was two years old and his little sister died.

They have endless hunger, fear on their fingertips, broken and battered like bloodied guardians of the night. Night swallows them, cradles them, comforts them.

He knows that they are coming.

* * *

- **one am** - 

_he remembers, flashes of light against his closed eyelids. _

pansy's hands, reaching into a bag of mints that she liked to roll around in her mouth while she did her homework in front of the fire in the slytherin commonroom. greg would peer over her shoulder, his mouth framing the numbers of arithmancy slowly as he patiently tried to keep up, muttering sums under his breath.

greg was slow in everything he did, his bulky frame a mass of warmth as he pressed in close between pansy and vincent as they yelled from draco as he flew overhead, his own private eagle dive, one that he had created on long hours by himself at malfoy mansion, in a hope to beat potter.

how he wishes life would go back to a time when beating harry potter was all that mattered.

* * *

- **two am** - 

A cloth is passed over the fogged up window again, fifth time in an hour that the low heat of breath has clung to the glass.

Eyes begin the get heavier, but everytime he thinks about dozing off, the chocking uneven cough from the tangle of blankets on the mattress in the far corner startles him back to wakefulness. His head is foggy, tongue clinging to the roof of his mouth from not enough water and stress.

Stress also makes his hands shake, or perhaps that's the fear too, the fear that he's lived with for days, weeks, months, consuming him, ever since he watched that green light swallow away an old man.

Magic can't save them now. It was destroy them from the inside, their saviour has become their own sealed fate, and the fate is one of uncertainity.

* * *

- **three am** - 

_he always loved the smell that clung to the walls in the dungeons, to see the fragments of light that came through low windows, peering in from the outside world. _

he can just feel severus' big hands framing his face as a thirteen year old boy, when he was half-hysterical with grief over his grandmothers death two days before, calming him, enfolding him with dark eyes and robes that smelt like the potions store room, where he would spend hours on end, reading labels and creating concoctions in his head.

he gets chocked up just thinking of severus, because he could see him now, sitting on a low chair reading, sipping whiskey from a glass that sent rainbows around the room, reflecting candlelight and smokey wood-burning scent.

no one deserves to die alone, except maybe him.

* * *

- **four am** - 

He stares at the dim lights of the clock next to his leg, and wonders what a.m. and p.m. actually stand for.

He knows that they're coming, his skin peals away from his bones and tries to crawl away through the cracks in the floorboards, but his tugs it back into place, holding his pulse for dear life as if to remind himself that he's still living, alive-alive-alive, a mantra in his head, something to focus on, to startle himself from almost sleep because he can feel his eyes drifting, dropping, closing, slamming open, like a cycle, a drug, a tune he just can't stop humming.

He's such a fool.

He knew he'd never survive this, never be strong enough, brave enough. He knew they'd come, he's known ever since he ran away, got on his broomstick and just took off out of a tower window on their last night at Hogwarts.

Because they could never get away, never be free, together, happy.

The blankets shift on the mattress, settles like the pale moon on window frames across the streets.

* * *

- **five am** - 

_he knew all about falling. _

he could see dumbledore falling backward, backwards into the everlasting night, suspended for a moment, a final breath lingering in his years, but not at loudly as the sound of his own heart trying to drum itself out of his chest.

he knew the moment when potter fell of his broom when the dementors flooded the pitch when they were thirteen, saw the wildness in his eyes, the despair that etched his face as he tumbled through the night and knew he'd see that in his nightmares for the rest of his life.

he watched his little sister fall down the stairs when she was two years old, saw the way her blood stained the rug while his mother screamed helplessly at her side, saw his own shaking hands as the houseelves coaxed him away.

felt his heart falling through the bottom of his stomach when harry had leaned over the table at some inn somewhere in the middle of nowhere and pressed his mouth against his own cold, chapped lips. if it wasn't so messy and clumsy and perfect it would have been laughable. but nothing amused him much these days.

oh yes, he could write a whole book on falling alone.

* * *

- **six am** - 

He hears them first. Hears the creak of the stairs, Harry's breathing behind him quickens as the mattress shifts.

He stumbles to his feet, panic rising in his veins, looks around, desperate _a way out, there has to be a way out, think think think, there has to be a way!_

But there isn't, there's nowhere else left to run. They have closed in, finally, no where left to go, no way to defend themselves, just him, and Potter, and their dreams shattered on the grubby kitchen tiles. His heart is beating so fast that he thinks it's going to leap out of his chest and explode, there has to me a better way, another way to go.

There must be a saviour and that saviour has a name.

* * *

- **seven am** - 

_silence_.

- finished -


End file.
